3473 books across eight primary genres: romance, fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery and thrillers, historical fiction, literary fiction and adventure. Romantasy and contemporary romance are tags on top of those shelves rather than genres of their own. Every page gives you the author, the publication year, the series it belongs to and a short synopsis that stops before the plot turns.
Search by title or author, narrow the list by primary genre or by tag, or sort it. Every title here is a different book: no duplicate editions and no omnibus volumes. A book that genuinely belongs to two genres appears once and is listed on both.
This is page 65 of the list. The search box and the filter chips read the whole catalogue, not just this page, and the page links below walk the shelf in order.
Showing 48 of 3473 books
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Results below cover the whole catalogue, not just this page. Use the page links to browse everything in order.
Rating coming soonIn 1939 a nineteen-year-old refugee from Prague arrives in New York and moves in with his seventeen-year-old cousin, who was born in Brooklyn. Between them they invent a superhero, and the two of them become part of the golden age of the comic book. The Escapist is their way of fighting back.
Rating coming soonThe magistrate of a village is shot in his study at the vicarage, and everybody who was in the house at the time seems to have a reason for wanting him dead. Nobody heard the shot, and the person who confesses to the killing is not the only one who could have done it.
Rating coming soonIn a village in Afghanistan in 1952, a ten-year-old boy and his three-year-old sister are separated when their father decides to sell the girl to a childless couple in Kabul. The decision follows the family for generations, and the book is told by nine different people. Each of the nine speaks in their own voice.
Rating coming soonWang Lung is a Chinese farmer who works his land and takes pride in it, and the novel follows him and his wife O-Lan from poverty to a position where the family of the great house nearby is no longer above him. The land is what he holds on to and what he loses sight of.
Rating coming soonDuring a war between the stars, one side develops a language that can be used as a weapon, because learning it changes how a person thinks and turns them into an unwitting traitor. A poet and linguist is recruited to work out what it is. The language is the weapon and the puzzle at the same time.
Rating coming soonIn a near-future America that has been almost completely mechanised, there is no more need for human labour, and the people whose skills machines have replaced have nothing to do. An engineer named Paul Proteus begins to think about getting out of it. The engineers are not happy either.
Rating coming soonIt is 1936 in Flint, Michigan, and Bud is ten years old, motherless and on the run. He has a suitcase with his own important things in it, a set of rules he has written for himself, and a belief about who his father might be. He has a plan of his own.
Rating coming soonA poverty-stricken young American is living in Paris and writing about it, and the book is his own account of the streets, the rooms and the people he is getting through the days with. There is very little plot and a great deal of the narrator. It is as much about the voice as about what happens.
Rating coming soonJack Gladney teaches Hitler studies at a college in a small American town, and he lives there with his wife and their blended family. An industrial accident releases a cloud of something into the air, and the ordinary worries of the household turn into something larger. The household has fears of its own to deal with as well.
Rating coming soonFranny Glass is a college student who has come to the end of her patience with the people around her, and she is trying to get out of it by spiritual means. Her younger brother Zooey, an actor, is the one who tries to talk her through it, and he does most of the talking.
Rating coming soonNine Americans, whose lives have each been changed by trees in some way, are brought together by the destruction of forests. One of them was shot out of the sky in Vietnam and saved by a banyan tree, and the book is made of their separate stories. The trees are the ones with the longer story.
Rating coming soonThe novel is set on a street of sardine canneries in Monterey, California, during the Depression, and it is about the people who live there: a grocer, a marine biologist and the leader of a group of derelict men who decide to do something for him. What happens matters less than who is there.
Rating coming soonJohn Grady Cole leaves Texas for Mexico, where he finds work breaking horses on a ranch and falls in love with the owner's daughter. What he has done to get there follows him, and the novel is the story of what it costs him. He is not the only person in the book who pays for it.
Rating coming soonCedric Errol is a small American boy who knows nothing about his father's English family until he is told that he is to be an earl. He goes to England to live with a grandfather who dislikes everything about him, and the two of them have to get used to each other. The boy does not hold any of it against him.
Rating coming soonWhen the last of the Roman legions leaves Britain, a young officer named Aquila decides that his loyalty belongs to the country he was born in rather than to Rome. He joins the forces of a Roman-British leader to fight the Saxons. The country has to be held together after the legions go.
Rating coming soonIn the England of 1377 a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother has just died is accused of theft by the steward of the manor and declared outside the protection of the law. He has nobody to go to and no name of his own beyond the one his mother gave him.
Rating coming soonAn American veteran of the Second World War goes back to Germany after the fighting to find the woman he left there, and stays. What he finds is a country in ruins where the currency everybody deals in is not money but American cigarettes. He stays there far longer than he meant to.
Rating coming soonPercy Jackson gets an urgent call from his friend Grover and sets out at once, with his friends and his sword, to find out what has happened. What the demigods find is that a goddess and one of their own have been taken. The army they are up against is not a small one.
Rating coming soonTwo children go to stay with a grandfather they hardly know, and find that his house and the grounds around it are not what they appear to be. The estate is a refuge for magical creatures, and there are rules about what the children may do there. The rules are there for a reason.
Rating coming soonConor is thirteen and his mother is dying of cancer, and at night a monster comes to the house and tells him stories. What the monster wants is the truth that Conor will not say out loud, and it is not interested in being a comfort. Conor has been dealing with all of it on his own.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is eleven years old and she is learning how to be a witch. She leaves the chalk country where she grew up to serve as apprentice and maid to an elderly witch called Miss Level, and finds that her new teacher has two bodies and a spirit who does the housework. Something that cannot be seen and cannot be killed has followed her there and wants her mind, and the work of a witch does not stop because of it.
Rating coming soonA family of vampires from Uberwald is invited to the naming of a royal baby, and the witches of Lancre find that the vampires have trained themselves out of their weaknesses. They wear bright clothes, drink wine and stay up until noon. The witches of Lancre are the ones who have to answer them.
Rating coming soonThe Night Watch has two problems: murders that appear to have been committed by a golem, and the poisoning of the Patrician, which nobody can work out how anyone managed. Several of the city's golems have gone missing as well, and none of it fits together at all. Every answer the Watch finds leads to another question.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is nine, and she thinks her grandmother, a shepherd, may have been a witch. When something begins taking children from the countryside, Tiffany has to deal with it, with the help of a very small and very violent people. She has never been taught anything about witchcraft, and she has to begin somewhere.
Rating coming soonGranny Weatherwax and her small coven come home to Lancre and find crop circles in the fields, which means that the boundaries between worlds are thin. What comes through them is the elves, and the elves are not the charming creatures of stories. The answer to them is not a magical one.
Rating coming soonAgnes Nitt leaves Lancre to look for a career at the Opera House in Ankh-Morpork, and the witches follow when Granny Weatherwax realises that Nanny Ogg has not been paid for her very popular cookbook. What they walk into is a story rather like The Phantom of the Opera, and the witches are not sentimental about opera.
Rating coming soonTiffany Aching is running her own steading and looking after the people of the Chalk when the question of who holds the ground comes up again. The Kelda of the Nac Mac Feegle has something worrying her, and there is work for a witch to do. It is the last of the books in the series.
Rating coming soonGaladriel Higgins is a sorceress at a school of black magic where the pupils are in danger of being eaten before they can graduate. She has spent her whole time there suppressing what she can do, and now she has to get through her final year. She has to decide what to do with what she can do.
Rating coming soonSomething malevolent has been hiding in a park in a town in Illinois for years, and a man named John Ross is drawn there by nightmares that warn him a great evil is about to be released. A teenager with powers she does not understand is caught up in it, and the two of them have to work together.
Rating coming soonEvery night the corelings rise out of the ground and take on form: sand demons, wood demons, wind demons, flame demons. The only thing that keeps people alive is the ancient and half-forgotten system of wards, and the time has come to stand against the night. The first of the five books is where the story begins.
Rating coming soonThe sun is going down on humanity and the night belongs to the demons, and the population that is left has to hide behind symbols of power it no longer entirely understands. This is the second book of the series in which that situation is being changed. The demons come up as the sun goes down.
Rating coming soonOn the night of the new moon the demons rise in force, and what they are looking for is two men, either of whom might turn out to be the Deliverer of prophecy. The scattered remains of humanity are waiting to see which of them it is. The two of them have been waiting for this night as well.
Rating coming soonFor as long as anyone can remember, the demons have come up out of the ground at night and hunted human beings down to a few scattered settlements. This is the book in which the story that began with The Warded Man is brought to an end. The reckoning with that place is what the book is for.
Rating coming soonArtemis Fowl has put his whole fortune into a project that he believes will save the planet and everybody on it, human and fairy alike. It is not the sort of thing he usually does, and the people who know him are suspicious. What has happened to Artemis is the puzzle the book sets up.
Rating coming soonNesta Archeron is proud, quick to anger and slow to forgive, and since the war she has been unable to find a way to live with what she has seen. The novel follows her rather than her sister Feyre, and it is her account of getting through it. She has been difficult to live with since the war.
Rating coming soonSmash knew all about ogres, having a human mother and being one himself: they are huge and horribly ugly, and they are also generally agreed to be so stupid that there is very little they can be trusted with. Smash is not quite either. He is an ogre with a human mother.
Rating coming soonHetty is fourteen and has just been discharged from the Foundling Hospital, and she goes into service as a scullery maid. She has also found out that the kitchen maid at the hospital is her mother, and she is trying to find out who her father was. Her mother is the kitchen maid at the hospital where she grew up.
Rating coming soonAnya had wanted to move to Britain and start again, and now that she is there she sits in a school where nobody understands her and thinks about the Polish summer skies she left behind. Then she meets a boy called Dan. He is not a good influence on her.
Rating coming soonElsie Kettle lives with her grandmother and is looking forward to going to London for the coronation of Elizabeth II, and then the two of them are taken into hospital with tuberculosis. What she finds on the ward is a set of other children and a hospital cat called Queenie. The ward is full of children in the same position.
Rating coming soonPenelope is sent to convalesce at her aunt's farmhouse in Derbyshire, and while she is there she finds herself slipping back into the 1580s. What she witnesses there is an attempt to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, from her imprisonment. It is the scheme that history remembers as the Babington Plot.
Rating coming soonWanda Petronski wears the same faded blue dress to school every day, and one day she tells the girls who tease her that she has a hundred dresses at home. The teasing becomes a game, and then Wanda stops coming to school. The girls who teased her have to think about what they did.
Rating coming soonLale Sokolov is a Slovak Jew deported to Auschwitz in 1942, and because he speaks several languages he is given work the guards want done: marking newly arrived prisoners with the numbers that stand in for their names. The position keeps him fed and keeps him watched, and it is while he is doing it that he meets a young woman called Gita. The novel follows the two of them through the camp.
Rating coming soonA band makes one enormous record and plays one last show, and then it stops. Years afterwards, the people who were in the room are asked to explain how it happened: the singer who joined the group, the songwriter who started it, the players, the producer and the people who loved them. They do not remember the same decade the same way.
Rating coming soonThe Sarl are a feudal people who live on the eighth level of a shellworld, an artificial planet built as nested spheres by a race that is no longer around to explain it. Their king is murdered by the man who served him, and the heir who sees it happen has to run. He goes looking for the sister who left the world years before, and she is very far away.
Rating coming soonEvelyn Hugo spent decades as one of Hollywood's most famous actresses and married seven times, and at seventy-nine she has decided to tell the truth about all of it, but only to a young magazine writer who has no idea why she was chosen. What follows is the story Evelyn gives her, told in the order of the marriages.
Rating coming soonKya is six years old when her mother walks away from the shack in the North Carolina marsh where the family lives, and one by one the rest of them go too. She raises herself among the birds and the grasses, and grows up as the girl the nearest town calls the Marsh Girl. Years later, when a young man from that town is found dead, the two halves of her story meet.
Rating coming soonRobin wakes in a rehabilitation centre with no memory of his life and a strong suspicion that somebody is trying to kill him. He signs up for an experiment in which a group of volunteers reconstruct the late twentieth century inside an isolated society, and discovers he has been given a new body and a new name. The experiment has rules that nobody explained to him.
Rating coming soonSomething shatters the Moon, and an astronomer works out what follows: the pieces will spread into a band, come down as a rain of fire, boil the oceans and leave the surface uninhabitable for thousands of years. There are two years to get as many people and as much of the human species as possible into orbit, aboard a structure that was never built to hold them.
The library is split into eight primary genres so you can find the kind of book you actually want: romance, where the relationship carries the story; fantasy, from epic quests to cosy shops; science fiction, from the classics to this year's awards; horror, from gothic novels to haunted houses; mystery and thrillers, from detectives and spies to domestic suspense; historical fiction, for stories built inside a past period; literary fiction, for books whose interest is in the writing and the people rather than in a plot engine; and adventure, for journeys, survival and treasure hunts. Each shelf page says what belongs on it.
Tags are a second, separate layer. Romantasy marks the books where romance and a fantasy world carry the story together, and contemporary romance marks the love stories set in the modern real world. Neither is a genre: a tagged book still lives on one or two of the eight shelves, and the tag is a way to narrow a shelf rather than a shelf of its own. Tags have landing pages too.
The title, the author and the publication year are checked against the publisher or a library record before a page goes up, and the cover is the one that record carries. Where no source states the first-publication date, the page says the year is the earliest edition we could confirm instead of claiming a date.
The synopsis on each page is written for this library. It tells you who the characters are and what they are up against, then stops. It is not a review, there are no scores anywhere on these shelves, and nothing here claims that we have read a book we have not written about yet.
Baby Bat keeps the V4mp book library.
Goodreads and social links will be added soon.
Eight primary genres, each with its own filters. Titles that genuinely belong to two genres are listed on both and keep one page.
The love story is the plot: fantasy courts, dragon academies and modern cities all count.
676 booksPrimary genreEpic quests, grimdark cities, retold myths and a few very stubborn rabbits.
685 booksPrimary genreGeneration ships, dying empires, robots with opinions and one very unlucky astronaut.
536 booksPrimary genreHaunted houses, old vampires, cosmic dread and the odd very bad week.
381 booksPrimary genreDetectives, spies, locked rooms and the people who lie to the police.
599 booksPrimary genreCathedrals, courts, trenches and revolutions, all of it set in a past that is doing the work.
580 booksPrimary genreNovels where the prose carries the book: families, cities, memory and the modern self.
575 booksPrimary genreShipwrecks, expeditions, chases, frontiers and people who should have turned back.
324 booksOne page per book, shared between genres: 858 titles sit on more than one genre right now. Romance 676, Fantasy 685, Sci-Fi 536, Horror 381, Mystery & Thriller 599, Historical Fiction 580, Literary Fiction 575, Adventure 324.
Tags cut across the genres. 225 of the 3473 books carry one.
Romance at the centre of the story, with a fantasy world carrying it.
70 booksTagModern love stories: offices, small towns, sports teams, group chats and people who talk too much.
155 booksRomantasy 70 and Contemporary Romance 155. A tag landing works like a shelf: search, subgenre chips, primary-genre chips and sorting.
